histofthought1

The late Spanish scholastics 129through all the faculties of man, not simply through faith but through reasonand the senses. Protestantism, and especially Calvinism, sternly put Godoutside man's faculties, considering, for example, sensate embodiments ofman's love for God in painting or sculpture as blasphemous idolatry to bedestroyed in order to clear the path for the only proper communication withGod: pure faith in revelation. The Thomist stress on reason as a means ofapprehending God's natural law and even aspects of divine law was reviledby a sole Protestant emphasis on faith in God's arbitrary will. While someProtestants adopted natural law theories, the basic Protestant thrust was oppositionto any natural law attempts to derive ethics or political philosophyfrom the use of man's reason. For Protestants, man was too inherently sinfuland corrupt for his reason or his senses to be anything but an embodiment ofcorruption; only pure faith in God's arbitrary and revealed commands waspermissible as a groundwork for human ethics. But this meant that for Protestantsthere was also very little natural law groundwork from which to criticizeactions of the state. Calvinism and even Lutheranism provided little orno defences against the absolutist state which burgeoned throughout Europeduring the sixteenth century and triumphed in the seventeenth century.If Protestantism opened the way for the absolute state, the secularists ofthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries embraced it. Shorn of natural lawcritiques of the state, new secularists such as the Frenchman Jean Bodinembraced the state's positive law as the only possible criterion for politics.Just as the anti-scholastic Protestants extolled God's arbitrary will as thefoundation for ethics, so the new secularists raised the state's arbitrary will tothe status of unchallengeable and absolute 'sovereign'.On the deeper level of the question of how we know what we know, or'epistemology', Thomism and scholasticism suffered from the contrastingbut allied assaults by the champions of 'reason' and 'empiricism'. In Thomistthought, reason and empiricism are not separated but allied and interwoven.Truth is built up by reason on a solid groundwork in empirically knownreality. The rational and empirical were integrated into one coherent whole.But in the first part of the seventeenth century, two contrasting philosophersmanaged between them the fatal sundering of the rational and the empiricalthat continues to plague the scientific method until the present day. Thesewere the Englishman Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and the Frenchman ReneDescartes (1596-1650). Descartes was the champion of a dessicated mathematicaland absolutely certain 'reason' divorced from empirical reality,while Bacon was the advocate of sifting endlessly and almost mindlesslythrough the empirical data. Both the distinguished English lawyer who roseto become Lord Chancellor (Lord Verulam), Viscount of the Realm, andcorrupt judge, and the shy and wandering French aristocrat, agreed on onecrucial and destructive point: the severing of reason and thought from empiri-